I recently spent a day photographing a beautifully refurbished Victorian house in south London for Hughes Developments (full gallery on their site here).

The owners had created a country home feel in a house that is just 5 miles from the centre of London. Maybe because they're just a few miles from some of London's biggest and best outdoor spaces - Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common - they'd asked Hughes to create a boot room for them. It was a tight space to photograph, and though I'd shot the rest of the house using almost exclusively natural light, with a bit of feature lighting thrown in here and there, this required a bit of extra light to make it work.

Shooting through the doorway into the boot room was just about the only way to go, as it was a very narrow space. Little natural light was getting into the boot room, and not from a flattering direction. The room lights would probably have worked, with a bit of tweaking in post, but flash allowed me to create more interesting light that modelled the joinery, wellies and coats more attractively.

Shooting through the door also offered the advantage of allowing me to hide the Speedlite in the side of the room the camera couldn't see. I used Pocket Wizards to trigger the flash. The lens is a Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8.

Here's the various lighting scenarios and the final, processed image: